During operations in which a medical device is invasively or non-invasively inserted into the human body, a precise spatial location of the medical device inserted into the human body as well as precise spatial locations of human tissues is required in order to increase the success rate of surgery and prevent unexpected medical emergencies.
In the conventional medical technology, for the diagnosis and treatment of a patient, a medical device that enters the body of the patient is inserted without a precise location thereof after three dimensional images of the body of the patient are captured in advance using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), PET CT, gamma camera, or the like.
This medical technology has problems in that tissues of the patient body may be unnecessarily dissected and the undesired tissue dissection may cause fetal complications since three-dimensional spatial coordinates of the patient body are known through MRI or CT but three-dimensional coordinates of the medical device inserted into the patient body cannot be grasped in real time during operations.
In order to solve these problems, there is provided “a relative coordinate extracting device and a medical imaging device using the same (Korean Patent Publication No. 10-2012-0096729)” as a technology of obtaining spatial coordinates of the patient body during operations. This technology discloses that an image capturing device is installed in the patient body and relative coordinates of the image capturing device with respect to a target marker are calculated, but has problems in that accurate spatial coordinates of the patient cannot be recognized in a region of the human body in which the image capturing device is installed, and in cases where a prompt surgical operation needs to be done due to the critical condition of the patient, the installation of the image capturing device and the coordinate analysis may cause waste of so called golden time.
In addition, an example of a technology for analyzing a three-dimensional image of a particular subject is “a three-dimensional shape measurement method and a three dimensional measurement system (Korean Patent Publication No: 10-2012-0090964”. This technology discloses that coordinate values representing a three-dimensional shape of a first part of a subject to be measured and coordinate values representing a three-dimensional shape of a second part of the subject are converted into coordinate values based upon a reference coordinate system identified by marks, and the coordinate values after the conversion are synthesized, so that entire three-dimensional shape data of the subject are obtained. This technology is somewhat similar to a proposal of the present invention with respect to three-dimensional spatial coordination of a medical device. However, this technology requires a separate light source and a reference coordination system, which cannot be used at the time of separate operations, and thus has a decisive problem in that this equipment cannot be placed in an operation room. Moreover, this technology merely recognizes the three-dimensional shape of a particular subject, but cannot describe the coordinates of the particular subject in a three-dimensional space. Therefore, this technology cannot be applied to the three-dimensional space coordinates of the medical device. Recently, it is a trend to perform operations and procedures using various images, and here, the excellence of performance cannot be provided since the operations or procedures are performed while different images are determined through different imaging devices.
Throughout the entire specification, many cited documents and patent documents are referenced and their citations are represented. The disclosures of cited documents and patent documents are entirely incorporated by reference into the present specification, and the level of the technical field within which the present invention falls, and details of the present invention are explained more clearly.